The Internet was supposed to democratise information, and back in the days of open forums it actually did - when search engines actually found relevant content instead of paid slop.
Then all the Internet’s niche communities moved into Discord and that content disappeared, locked away behind account walls, unsearchable and unfindable. Now Discord own that data and can use it, sell it or restrict it as they please.
Just like with google maps, millions of people have spent countless unpaid hours building an absolute treasure trove of data not owned by the public, but owned by a megacorp.
On the angle of being maybe able to find some useful info that forums used to provide… nice. On every single other angle, gross.
Plus the big search engines are garbage these days anyway due to all the LLM slop and I highly, HIGHLY, doubt you’ll actually be able to find anything useful from a search that includes this index.
oh wow somehow that’s worse
It is.
The Internet was supposed to democratise information, and back in the days of open forums it actually did - when search engines actually found relevant content instead of paid slop.
Then all the Internet’s niche communities moved into Discord and that content disappeared, locked away behind account walls, unsearchable and unfindable. Now Discord own that data and can use it, sell it or restrict it as they please.
Just like with google maps, millions of people have spent countless unpaid hours building an absolute treasure trove of data not owned by the public, but owned by a megacorp.
I hate that we have done this to ourselves.
Interestingly, they announced awhile back that they’re going to expose it to search engine indexing : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/discord-to-let-search-engines-index-public-server-messages/
On the angle of being maybe able to find some useful info that forums used to provide… nice. On every single other angle, gross.
Plus the big search engines are garbage these days anyway due to all the LLM slop and I highly, HIGHLY, doubt you’ll actually be able to find anything useful from a search that includes this index.